Karim Chelouati and Eric Malm co-wrote this post.
When it comes to developing and deploying your mission-critical apps, VMware Tanzu Application Service continues to offer enterprise organizations an unparalleled combination of developer convenience, operational stability, comprehensive security, and multi-cloud consistency. With plenty of new features and refinements coming out with every new version, it's an app platform that our customers can rely on for the long term, wherever they need to run it.
As we announced last fall, VMware has taken our experience from developing Tanzu Application Service, the Spring ecosystem, and leadership in the Kubernetes community to deliver VMware Tanzu Application Platform, which is now generally available with its version 1.0 release. Tanzu Application Platform is built on app-aware principles made popular by Spring Framework and Tanzu Application Service, while embracing and taking full advantage of its Kubernetes core. We couldn't be more excited to see how it will help entire organizations transform their app development and platform practices, all on top of Kubernetes.
Although Tanzu Application Service and Tanzu Application Platform both strive to deliver the same core transformational outcomes, they of course express the details differently: Tanzu Application Platform relies on the Tanzu and kubectl command line interface (CLI) tools, while Tanzu Application Service instead uses VMware Tanzu Operations Manager and the Cloud Foundry CLI. For those Tanzu Application Service customers who become interested in leveraging the unique operational and infrastructure benefits of Tanzu Application Platform on top of Kubernetes, we intend to enable smooth transitions and interoperation between the two platforms. To that end, we are excited to provide an initial beta release of what we're calling the Application Service Adapter for VMware Tanzu Application Platform.
Discover the best of both worlds
The Application Service Adapter is designed to deploy to a Kubernetes cluster alongside Tanzu Application Platform and to provide application teams compatibility with their existing Tanzu Application Service tools, such as the Cloud Foundry CLI. Application development teams can then keep using the same "cf push" workflows to develop and deploy their apps, while unbeknownst to them the platform teams supporting them can start to consolidate their application platforms on top of Kubernetes and Tanzu Application Platform.
The initial beta release of Application Service Adapter is focused on providing the app lifecycle and routing capabilities of Tanzu Application Service, and of course first and foremost the "cf push" command at the core of its developer experience. The Application Service Adapter also presents the familiar Cloud Foundry org and space hierarchy that surrounds those development team workflows, with those concepts mapping naturally to Kubernetes namespaces underneath. But don't just take our word for it: see it in action here!
Committed to open source
We are also proud to build the core of the Application Service Adapter within the Cloud Foundry open source community. Our teams have been driving the revitalized community efforts to provide the Cloud Foundry developer experience on top of Kubernetes and the cloud native community standards such as Cloud Native Buildpacks and Contour that also form the core of Tanzu Application Platform. The result is a simplified, streamlined architecture that is primed to take full advantage of the cloud native ecosystem surrounding Kubernetes.
Install Application Service Adapter today
Curious about moving your application platform onto Kubernetes infrastructure? The Application Service Adapter for Tanzu Application Platform is the perfect tool to discover what a smooth transition would be like, while still using the Cloud Foundry CLI and other Tanzu Application Service clients.
The Application Service Adapter beta is available now on Tanzu Network, and you can learn more about it by checking out the docs. Just like Tanzu Application Platform itself, the Application Service Adapter is designed to be installed as a Tanzu package with the Tanzu CLI, taking advantage of the great work we've advanced with the Carvel toolchain. Please try it out yourselves on your favorite Kubernetes distribution and let us know what's great and what's missing!
